The clouds of the morning had broken and dispersed, and Marion was surprised to see how intensely blue the sky was, with only wispy pale clouds high up and far away. The wind was light, almost mild. The alder trees on the opposite bank were covered in stiff sharp-green catkins interspersed with dark bobbles like little fir cones, and as Marion looked along the stream bank, she saw a new pallor hanging over the willow trees and the occasional vertical stems of the pussy willows were dotted with silver knobs.

‘It could be spring at last,’ she said to herself, but she knew that spring often came early, and then degenerated again into icy winds and snowstorms.

She carried the heavy bucket up the slope and met Agnes, who had hobbled as far as her garden gate.

‘The water has gone down,’ Marion said. ‘Tell Molly. You can get to the pulley and the rope, but the ground’s very wet.’

‘We had some through the roof,’ Agnes said. ‘Wet came in on the bed, soaked the straw. Can’t seem to get warm … ’ She would have gone on and on in similar complainings but Marion did not wait to listen. She had heard so much talk like this from Agnes and Marge, hours of it, year after year.

Back in her cottage Marion berated Peterkin for not attending to the fire, which was very low. He excused himself by saying she had often told him not to touch the fire.

‘Of course I said that when you were a child, same as I’d say to Alice now, but now you must learn to look after it properly. You are old enough to do that sort of thing. Go out and get another log or two, dry ones if you can.’

How difficult children could be. Sometimes you thought they were old enough to be sensible and then they behaved like infants, and another time quite a small child would act in a responsible manner such as you would not have believed. They got sensible and then they got silly again, just like the spring – coming one morning and going back into winter the next.

While so thinking she busied herself making thin scones, mixing her roughly sieved flour with water, banging out little balls of the paste flat on to the hearthstone with the palm of her hand, and waiting for them to cook. It was a poor kind of food, this unleavened stuff, but there was no more of the rancid bacon fat to tempt her to add it to the flour. She had to bang the dough out thin or it burnt on the outside while still raw inside. Proper bread, the best, made with ale-froth yeast, was only possible in an oven; flour mixed with sour milk and cooked on the hearthstone under her broken jar was not bad, but today’s meagre, hard, thin, saltless, fatless scones were all there was to eat in these cold February days. She thought again of the ducks and the rich treat they promised.